A few years ago in Malaysia I found myself reading the national paper, the New Straits Times.
There was a headline on the front page that caught my eye. It read something like ‘New road to the airport will make it easier to get to the airport’. I’m sure those weren’t the exact words, but that was pretty much the import of the thing. I read the whole of the ensuing article, which effectively confirmed at length what I already had been led to believe — that the new road to the airport would indeed make it much, much easier to get to the airport.
I read it again. Something seemed wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It felt altogether different from any newspaper article I had come across before.
And then I spotted what was odd. None of the usual paragraphs I had been expecting had appeared. There was no call for the resignation of a minister over delays to the road’s construction; no reports of environmentalists having discovered a rare toad nesting on the proposed route; no interviews with the hastily convened Road-to-the-Airport Residents’ Association decrying the noise from the proposed road or demanding a public enquiry. There wasn’t even an inset photograph with the caption ‘Resident Mrs Asiyah: “I don’t like the new road to the airport”.’
One of my colleagues wandered over. ‘You realise that paper is effectively a government propaganda sheet, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Is that so? Well, in that case, I have to say I’m all in favour of it.’
To me the trouble with modern journalism isn’t that its practitioners spend so much of their time rooting around in celebrities’ bins. That’s the good bit. The trouble is that the whole business has become lazily formulaic.
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